The Biblical Structure of History: Chapter 10, Entropy
That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built. – Bertrand Russell (1903)
A. Covenant Model, Point 5
Point 5 of the biblical covenant is succession.
Point 5 of biblical social theory is inheritance, as is point five of the biblical theory of history.
Point 5 of humanist historiography unofficially is succession. Humanists offer multiple theories of succession. But this is self-deception. Why? Because all of humanism’s theories of succession have a cosmic limit: the heat death of the universe. This is the inescapable implication of the second law of thermodynamics. Kinetic energy irreversibly moves to dispersed energy. Therefore, coherence moves toward randomness. This one-way process results in entropy. At the end of time, there will be no more change, at least not in the world of molecules. Life will long since have disappeared. There will be nothing left to impute meaning, either to the lifeless present or the past.
Humanists rarely talk about entropy. When they offer their social theories, they do not discuss it. When they offer their theories of imputed value, they do not discuss it. Entropy is the impersonal cosmic veto of all the dreams and schemes of autonomous mankind.
All humanist theories of progress eventually hit the cosmic brick wall of entropy. There is no permanent progress possible in a world governed by the second law of thermodynamics. There is only death. All theories of progress are an illusion, humanism teaches, except that humanism refuses to teach it. Occasionally, a humanist discusses entropy as the ultimate negation of every theory of progress, but only rarely. Bertrand Russell was an exception.
In 1903, Russell was 31 years old. He was a rising star in the fields of philosophy and mathematics. He was not a shooting star. His star continued to rise. By the middle of the twentieth century, he was the most famous philosopher in the world. He was famous mainly for his political activities: disarmament, pacifism, and socialism. But he was always regarded by philosophers as one of the most competent in his fields.
In 1903, his first major book was published: The Principles of Mathematics. Between 1910 and 1913, he and co-author Alfred North Whitehead wrote their three-volume work: Principia Mathematica. It became a classic almost as soon as it was published. Simultaneously, he wrote The Problems of Philosophy (1912) and Our Knowledge of the External World (1914). Then came The Analysis of Mind (1921) and The Analysis of Matter (1927). Yet it was his 1903 article, “A Free Man’s Worship,” that was most widely quoted during his lifetime. I began this chapter with an extract from the early section of that article.
I know of no more pessimistic assessment of man’s condition written by a serious philosopher. It was an application of modern physical theory. Specifically, he was applying the principle of entropy to the future of mankind and mankind’s world. Entropy is an inescapable implication of the second law of thermodynamics. Here is a simple definition from the New Scientist: “The second law of thermodynamics means hot things always cool unless you do something to stop them. It expresses a fundamental and simple truth about the universe: that disorder, characterised as a quantity known as entropy, always increases.” The article added this: “The British astrophysicist Arthur Eddington have [had] a stern warning to would-be theoretical physicists in 1915. ‘If your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation,’ he wrote.”
Russell’s article is remarkable for its call to emotional resistance in the face of inescapable pessimism. If entropy is true, then the entire cosmos is heading for oblivion. That state of oblivion is called the heat death of the universe. All change will cease when all kinetic energy is irreversibly dispersed. Everything warm will freeze, and nothing will ever warm up again. Time will end. Meaning will end. The meaninglessness that prevailed from the origin of the universe until the random evolution of man will once again reassert its impersonal sovereignty. There will be no living creature to impute meaning to the now-frozen universe. Russell understood this. Then he adopted the language of resistance to the inevitable.
When, without the bitterness of impotent rebellion, we have learnt both to resign ourselves to the outward rules of Fate and to recognise that the non-human world is unworthy of our worship, it becomes possible at last so to transform and refashion the unconscious universe, so to transmute it in the crucible of imagination, that a new image of shining gold replaces the old idol of clay. In all the multiform facts of the world—in the visual shapes of trees and mountains and clouds, in the events of the life of man, even in the very omnipotence of Death—the insight of creative idealism can find the reflection of a beauty which its own thoughts first made. In this way mind asserts its subtle mastery over the thoughtless forces of Nature. The more evil the material with which it deals, the more thwarting to untrained desire, the greater is its achievement in inducing the reluctant rock to yield up its hidden treasures, the prouder its victory in compelling the opposing forces to swell the pageant of its triumph.
This was a fine example of what we call whistling past the graveyard. Most evolutionists prefer to ignore this cosmic graveyard. They do not think about its implications for their lives.
Russell assumed that there will be no final judgment by God. On the basis of this assumption, he was filled with hope. There is no hell to serve as an intermediary prison (Luke 16), followed by the lake of fire (Revelation 20:14–15). This assumption is based on optimism by covenant-breakers. It is an optimism based on total pessimism with respect to the long-term legacy of mankind. After Russell abandoned Christianity as a teenager, he did not replace it with anything offering hope for mankind. This became his vision of victory:
Victory, in this struggle with the powers of darkness, is the true baptism into the glorious company of heroes, the true initiation into the overmastering beauty of human existence. From that awful encounter of the soul with the outer world, enunciation, wisdom, and charity are born; and with their birth a new life begins. To take into the inmost shrine of the soul the irresistible forces whose puppets we seem to be—Death and change, the irrevocableness of the past, and the powerlessness of Man before the blind hurry of the universe from vanity to vanity—to feel these things and know them is to conquer them.
He ended his sermon with this:
Brief and powerless is Man’s life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark. Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way; for Man, condemned to-day to lose his dearest, to-morrow himself to pass through the gate of darkness, it remains only to cherish, ere yet the blow falls, the lofty thoughts that ennoble his little day; disdaining the coward terrors of the slave of Fate, to worship at the shrine that his own hands have built; undismayed by the empire of chance, to preserve a mind free from the wanton tyranny that rules his outward life; proudly defiant of the irresistible forces that tolerate, for a moment, his knowledge and his condemnation, to sustain alone, a weary but unyielding Atlas, the world that his own ideals have fashioned despite the trampling march of unconscious power.
Russell was an excellent writer. He was a master of rhetoric. He had a mastery of logic. Few philosophers ever have both. He was not exaggerating rhetorically in this essay. His rhetoric was consistent with his logic. Given the doctrine of entropy, which is foundational to modern physics and modern cosmology, the best plan that men can adopt is to pursue the worship of the best of mankind. Men should build their ethics in terms of their suicidal mission in confronting the sovereign forces of impersonal fate. As to where this ethical system came from, he did not say. As to where the standards of ethics came from, which would enable us to decide what is good and what is evil, he did not say. He simply assumed that such an ethical system exists, and that men can discover it, follow it, and die in terms of it.
The common man did not pay any attention to this in 1903. Christianity in Great Britain and the United States still had influence. Most people still had hope in the future because they still believed in a God who brings hope in both history and eternity. But, among intellectuals, the worldview expressed in Russell’s essay began to spread. A fundamental pessimism began to take hold of some intellectuals. This pessimism is consistent with the doctrines of cosmic evolution, Darwinian biological evolution, and the second law of thermodynamics. It is the cosmic invocation of a Christian burial: ashes to ashes, dust to dust. But in the evolutionary worldview, there is no resurrection. There is no redemption. This view is comforting only for those who believe that this cosmic eschatology is preferable individually to the doctrine of final judgment as expounded in Luke 16 and Revelation 20:14–15. For such people, this really is a comfort. It is a delusion, but it is a comfort.
Historians do not write about entropy. They do not discuss its implications for their theory of history. They do not consider its implications for their theory of succession: the next stage of evolutionary development. But the doctrine of entropy undermines optimism. It undermines all meaning and purpose. It undermines hope.
What are some of the implications of the loss of faith in progress? Two major scholars of the late twentieth century explored this question: Robert Nisbet and Jacques Barzun.
Robert Nisbet was an influential social thinker in the United States, beginning in the mid-1960's. He had spent a decade as an administrator at the University of California, Riverside. Until he moved to the newly created UCR campus in 1954, he had been a professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. He had written one influential book: The Quest for Community (Oxford University Press, 1953). But then he disappeared academically for a decade.
In The Quest for Community, he asked these questions: Why did the modern world turn to totalitarianism in the first half of the twentieth century? What had taken place in the West that produced totalitarianism? He concluded that it had to do with the breakdown of social order. Those institutions to which men had given allegiance throughout history, such as the family, the church, the guild, the fraternal order, and similar voluntary associations, had faded in importance in the twentieth century. This left only the isolated individual and the modern nation-state. Men gained a sense of belonging through their participation in mass-movement politics. Totalitarian leaders began to attract citizens who were isolated, even though they were living in large cities. These leaders were able to offer a sense of brotherhood to millions of people who felt alone. The modern totalitarian state functioned as a substitute for the family, church, and voluntary associations that for millennia had given people a sense of purpose and participation. Collectivist totalitarianism was the product of individualism, institutionally speaking, even though, as a philosophy, totalitarianism is completely opposed to individualism.
In 1965, he began to write again. For the next two decades, he became one of the best-known conservative social scientists in the United States. This was because of the social changes that began to disrupt the United States and many other Western nations, 1965–1970. He had given a lot of thought to the kinds of changes that were taking place. So, when he began to write systematically about these changes, his influence grew extensively. It is revealing that Oxford University Press in 1962 changed the title of his book when it was released as a paperback: Community and Power. Then the student revolutions hit in late 1964. The anti-Vietnam War protests began in 1966. The drug-induced counterculture became a half-decade phenomenon. Oxford changed the title back to The Quest for Community.
Nisbet was more of a social commentator and social theorist than he was a social scientist. He was interested in the history of ideas. Here is where he had his major influence after 1965. I was fortunate to be his student from 1967 until he left the university in 1972. He was on my doctoral dissertation committee in 1972. In 1980, the conservative academic publishing company, Basic Books, published his book, History of the Idea of Progress. For some reason, he included no footnotes—a pity for those of us who collect footnotes.
He believed that societies need faith in the future. In his book, he traced the history of Western man’s faith in historical progress from the Greeks to the late twentieth century. I think he was wrong about the Greeks. I think they believed in cyclical history, just as J. B. Bury said in 1920. Nisbet was self-consciously reacting against Bury. I think Stanley Jaki was correct: the absence of a concept of linear time kept the Greeks and the Romans from moving beyond technology to science.
In the Introduction, he wrote the following about the idea of progress:
. . . I remain convinced that this idea has done more good over a twenty-five-hundred year period, led to more creativeness in more spheres, and given more strength to human hope and to individual desire for improvement than any other single idea in Western history. . . . The springs of human action, will, and ambition lie for the most part in beliefs about universe, world, society, and man which defy rational calculations and differ greatly from physio-psychological instincts. These springs lie in what we call dogmas. . . . Everything now suggests, however, that Western faith in the dogma of progress is waning rapidly in all levels and spheres in this final part of the 20th century. The reasons, as I attempt to show in the final chapter, have much less to do with the unprecedented world wars, the totalitarianisms, the economic depressions, and other major political, military, and economic afflictions which are peculiar to the 20th century than they do with the fateful if less dramatic erosion of all the fundamental intellectual and spiritual premises upon which the idea of progress has rested throughout its long history (pp. 8-9).
Chapter 9, “Progress at Bay,” discusses the evidence for the loss of faith in the West regarding the future. He wrote this: “Behind this spreading atmosphere of guilt and loss of meaning or purpose in the West and its heritage lies a constant erosion of faith in Western institutions; not just political but social, cultural, and religious institutions. Hardly a week passes without some fresh poll or survey indicating still greater loss of respect by Americans and Europeans for government, church, school, profession, industry, the media, and other once respected institutions—and, naturally, those who in one or other degree preside over or represent these institutions” (p. 332).
This passage indicates something that I regard as fundamental for a correct understanding of the decline of faith in the idea of progress. Nisbet touched on it, but he did not sufficiently emphasize it. The issue of progress is intimately tied to the idea of morality. The loss of a sense of moral purpose is at the heart of the loss of faith in the idea of progress. It is not just that people have lost faith in progress; they have lost faith in a moral universe of cause-and-effect, which once governed the thinking of the West. We should not separate the idea of progress from morality, which in turn is established through faith in God, who provides both purpose and meaning for the universe. If there was a single source of this loss of faith, it was Charles Darwin. His concept of unplanned biological change rested on his denial of any purpose in the universe prior to man. This is the heart of his system, and he knew it. He was reacting against teleology: cosmic purpose or design.
Darwin's followers latched onto the idea of man as the highest evolutionary being in the universe. Without man, Darwinists say, there is no purpose in the universe unless there is a higher evolutionary species somewhere in the cosmos whose sense of purpose trumps ours. (The idea of “higher” implies a hierarchy, which is a hierarchy of power: the survival of the fittest, as Herbert Spencer summarized it.) This places the origin of meaning and purpose in mankind: collective mankind. But who speaks for mankind? On what basis?
The heart of Darwin's theory is that nature has no autonomous purpose. It has no end in mind. It has no mind. It is not structured to benefit man. Man must struggle against the forces of nature in order to retain his dominance in nature. There is nothing outside of man that gives support to man, and there is nothing outside of man that guarantees man's success in extending his rule over nature in history. There is no natural law in Darwinism in the sense that was believed in Western history from the Roman-era Stoics to Darwin. There is also no sovereign God who oversees the affairs of men, which has been the belief of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam from the beginning.
Man is cut off from any source of positive or negative sanctions in response to a transcendent system of morals. With the triumph of Darwinism and secularism, faith in transcendental morality has disappeared among the intellectuals. This in turn has undermined their faith in progress. There is no way to define progress unless there is a universal hierarchy of values, meaning good, bad, and worst. The god of any society is the source of its laws and the enforcer of these laws. In the Darwinian universe, this means collective mankind. The trouble is, mankind cannot be trusted, precisely because mankind is afflicted with moral perversity.
In the Epilogue, Nisbet warned that, without faith in the future, no society can be maintained for long. The West therefore faces a crisis.
In our day, however, religion is a spent force. If God is not dead, he is ebbing away, and has been since the early part of the century. We have, in Jonathan Swift’s coruscating words, “just enough religion to make us hate but not enough to make us love one another”—or, enough to make us see the flaws and cankers of the society around us but not enough to generate hope for the future. Just as religion has seriously waned, so have most of the systems of thought which for a time served intellectuals as surrogates. There aren't many today who find either Spencer's first cause or Marx's dialectic convincing (p. 353).
He then surveyed the loss of faith within academic disciplines. He said that philosophy is a spent force. Nobody pays any attention or has any interest in what a professional philosopher thinks today. But who has replaced the philosophers? “There is no ready answer. We appear to be destitute of any reigning intellectual class. Intellectuals and artists have gone the way of business and political titans, of clergy and philosophers, of scholars and scientists. When has literature been held in as low estate as it is today in the West? Never has the gulf between creative writer and the public been as wide as it is now” (p. 354).
He then got to the point: the West’s lack of a sustaining culture.
The reason for this condition, this debasement of literature and estrangement of writer and public, is our lack of a true culture. And fundamental to this lack is the disappearance of the sacred, always at the heart of any genuine culture—from ancient Athens to Victorian England. For some time we thought we could live off the yield of the sacred, even though it was gone or passing away. Then it was easy to maintain belief in progress and, so believing, to seek to add what a cherished past had contributed. It is no longer easy, for behind the death of the past, the displacement of Western pride of civilization, the waning faith in economic growth in the works of reason lies the moribundity of religious conviction, of belief and faith in something greater than the life immediately around us (p. 354).
He quoted Alexis de Tocqueville. “When men have once allowed themselves to think no more of what is to befall them after life, they lapse readily into that complete and brutal indifference to futurity which is but to conformable to some propensities of mankind.” Nisbet continued: “Only on the basis of confidence in the existence of the divine power was confidence possible with respect to design or pattern in the world and in the history of the world. . . . But it is absent now, whether ever to be recovered, we cannot know. And with the absence of the sense of sacredness of knowledge there is now to be seen in more and more areas absence of respect for or confidence in knowledge—that is, the kind of knowledge that proceeds from reason and its intrinsic disciplines” (p. 355). Then he asked a crucial question: “How long, O Lord, how long?”
But is this contemporary Western culture likely to continue for long? The answer, it seems to me, must be in the negative—if we take any stock in the lessons of the human past. . . . I believe, first from the fact that never in history have periods of culture such as our own lasted for very long. They are destroyed by all the forces which constitute their essence. How can any society or age last very long if it lacks or is steadily losing the minimal requirements for a society— such requirements being the very opposite of the egocentric and hedonistic elements which dominate Western culture today? (p. 356).
He raised a related issue: religious renewal. “Whatever their future, the signs are present—visible in the currents of fundamentalism, Pentecostalism, even millennialism found in certain sectors of Judaism and Christianity. Even the spread of the occult and the cult of the West could well be one of the signs of a religious renascence, for, as it is well known, the birth of Christianity or rather its genesis as a world religion in Rome during and after the preaching of Paul was surrounded by a myriad of bizarre faiths and devotions.” There are also other signs. “By every serious reckoning the spell of politics and the political, strong since at least the seventeenth century, is fading. It is not simply a matter of growing disillusionment with government bureaucracy; fundamentally, it is declining faith in politics as a way of mind and life” (p. 356). With politics fading as a religion, there could be a revival of supernatural religion. That, too, was basic to the replacement of the Roman empire by Christendom, although Nisbet never said this explicitly. Augustine did.
Nisbet was talking about a loss of faith in politics as a source of healing. He was talking about the loss of faith in messianic politics. It was clear by 1980 that what he had described three decades earlier in The Quest for Community was dying. The old totalitarianism was fading. The Soviet Union no longer had faith in the Communist future. By the time this book was published, China was going through the transformation that was begun in 1979 by Deng Xiaoping. The Chinese economy was being freed up in terms of individual ownership of the means of production: a most un-Marxist concept.
It is worth noting that 1980 was the year of truth for Soviet Communism. The Moscow Olympics brought rich Western people to Moscow. The leaders of the Soviet empire saw the suits and watches and shoes of the West. They saw that the highest positions of power in the USSR enabled you to look like a Russian bureaucrat. The Soviet leaders never recovered from that realization. At exactly the same time, the Solidarity movement began in Poland, launched by the discovery in a railroad yard that cans labeled “fish” being sent to Moscow were in fact cans of Polish ham. That marked the beginning of the Polish revolt. A year before, a Pole had become Pope Paul II. I like to think of all this as providential. Rival systems of religion and politics went to war against each other.
Also fading in 1980 was messianic politics. The idea that political change will produce some sort of social regeneration was no longer taken seriously by people in the West. Political campaigns invoke the word “hope.” But the hope is not fulfilled. Political hope around the world has not been fulfilled. As this confidence in politics fades, something is going to replace it. That was what Nisbet saw as a real possibility in the West. More than this, he believed that, if this religious renewal does not take place in the West, then Western civilization will fade.
This had also been the view of Ptirim Sorokin a generation before Nisbet's book was published. Sorokin was the founder of the Department of Sociology at Harvard. In 1941, Sorokin's book appeared, The Crisis of Our Age. He called the worldview of modern man "sensate." If something cannot be touched and measured, it is thought to have no validity. Like Nisbet, he believed that it is not possible to maintain such an outlook without undermining civilization.
Jacques Barzun’s academic influence was considerable. He lived a long time: from 1907 to 2012. His first book was published in 1927. His final book appeared in 2004. In 2000, his magnum opus appeared: From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the present: 500 years of Western Cultural Life. Barzun was 93. This book is over 800 pages. I have never seen a one-volume book comparable to this one in terms of its consideration of the whole of Western culture, whether scientific, artistic, philosophical, moral, or political. The book is a tour de force.
Barzun was an intellectual giant. He was a history professor at Columbia University from 1928 to 1955. From 1955 to 1968, he was an administrator at Columbia. He was University Professor from 1968 to 1975. (Nisbet arrived in 1973.) Then he retired, with over 35 years to live. He continued to write in multiple fields throughout his career.
The layout of From Dawn to Decadence is odd. The chapters have no numbers. The final chapter is called “Demotic Life and Times.” It speaks of the fourth social revolution in the West, which was set off in Russia in 1917–18. Leaders around the West pay lip service to the rule of the people. This is seen to be democratic. He believes that this outlook should be called demotic: of the people.
He believed that modern Western culture, as launched in the Renaissance, is coming to a close. He looked at style and society. He regarded style as individual and society as institutional. “The aims and desires of the two overlap but generally conflict—a small civil war, for it is of course individuals who decide to carry out the official demands that are challenged or resisted by other individuals” (p. 773) He summarized the final decades of the twentieth century. “The strongest tendency of the later 20C was Separatism. It affected all earlier forms of unity. The fact was noticed early in this book apropos of culture. The ideal of pluralism had disintegrated and separatism took its place; as one partisan of the new goal put it: ‘Salad bowl is better than melting pot.’ The melting pot had not eliminated all diversities; it had created a common core.”
This is the heart of his book’s thesis. “At the outset, separatism might have seemed a mood that would pass. But if one surveyed the Occident and the world as well, one could see that the greatest political creation of the West, the nation-state, was stricken” (p. 774). He then listed several examples of nations that are beginning to split apart. Scotland and Wales want separatism from Great Britain. The Basques want separatism from Spain. So do the Alsatians. Italy is culturally divided between North and South. Belgian is split by language differences. “Other forces worked to de-nationalize. Immigrants from far-off emancipated colonies brought into Europe alien languages and customs. They huddled separately in slum enclaves—a Turkish settlement here, an Algerian suburb there. France had an African village, complete with medicine man and ritual chants and dances. . . . Europe was experiencing again the grand confusion of the peoples that had occurred in the late Roman Empire and tapered off in the Middle Ages” (pp. 774–75).
This was not confined to Europe. Separatism is rampant all over the globe, he writes. India separated from British rule, and Pakistan separated from India. Then Bangladesh separated from Pakistan. The East Timorese almost destroyed Indonesia. “Wherever one looked—at Ireland, the Middle East, South America, Southeast Asia, all of Africa, the Caribbean, and the whole ocean speckled with islands, one would find a nation or would-be nation at war to win or prevent independence” (p. 775).
He asked this question: “What makes a nation?” He answered: “A large part of the answer to that question is: common historical memories. When the nation's history is poorly taught in schools, ignored by the young, and proudly rejected by qualified elders, awareness of tradition consists only in wanting to destroy it.” Nisbet had made the same point two decades earlier.
As a kind of prophet, he announced: “The end is nigh!"
The end of the half millennium destroyed what the beginning had so painfully accomplished: put an end to feudal wars by welding together neighboring regions, assimilated foreign enclaves, set up strong kings over large territories, and done everything to foster loyalty to something larger than the eye could see. A common language, a core of historical memories with heroes and villains, compulsory public schooling and military service finally made the 19C nation-state the carrier of civilization.Now all these elements were decaying and could not be restored (p. 776).
He came to the heart of the matter institutionally: the inability of the nation-state to reduce violence.
The main merit of the nation-state was that over its large territory violence had been reduced; nobles first and citizens later were subjected to one law uniformly recognized and applied. In the last years of the era of nations, violence returned; crime was endemic in the West. Assault in the home, the office, and on city streets was commonplace and particularly vicious. . . . The prisons themselves, far from exerting the full force of the law, were scenes of perpetual violence. Humane sentiment had made them less rigorous, almost comfortable while prisoners' rights multiplied. The inmates formed gangs that govern, overawing the guards and abusing their fellow prisoners sexually and otherwise; riots and escapes were frequent (p. 776).
America’s public schools had become battlegrounds. He cited the figure of 50,000 incidents per year. “From their early years, pupils carried guns, assaulted each other, and on occasion committed little massacres by shooting into a group at random with a rapid-fire weapon” (p. 777). The nation-state’s most important single function, its ability to reduce violence, was beginning to break down in the final decades of the twentieth century.
There was also another factor: the expansion of the welfare state.
The welfare ideal did not merely see to it that the poor should be able to survive, but that everybody should be safe and at ease in a hundred ways. Besides providing health care, pensions ("social security"), and workmen's compensation for accidents, it undertook to protect every employee by workplace regulations and every consumer by laws against harm from foods, drugs, and the multiform dangers that industry creates. All appliances were subject to design control and inspection. The citizen must moreover be protected from actions by others that are not visibly hostile or inherently criminal, those, for example, that can be committed by the imaginative in trade, investment, and banking.At the same time, it was also held that the state had the duty of supporting art and science, medical research, and the integrity of the environment, while it also made sure the children were not simply literate but educated up to and through college— rules, rules, definitions, classifications, and exceptions—indignation—and litigation. The welfare state cannot avoid becoming the judiciary state (p. 777).
The cost of all this has grown ever larger. High taxes are unavoidable. So is waste. So is the administrative state.
As the welfare state needed a new bureau for every added program, the lack of men and women properly trained for the diverse operations was crippling. . . . Those appointed to man them improvised their procedures, and as legislation augmented, laid down rules that filled hundreds of pages, an impenetrable jungle for citizens and officials both. One reads of a new ordinance of 1999 issued by large city to control demolition for low-cost housing; the news report casually mentions that it comes on top of 56 others. Achieving some ordinary purpose was difficult and carrying through a large undertaking [was] impossible without help. The prosperous tribe of consultants, strong minds who had mastered one set of intricacies, enabled entrepreneurs armed with patience to attain their ends (pp. 778–79).
Society has become enormously complex. “As in the years before the French Revolution, demotic society had become labyrinthine” (p. 779). It is too complex for politicians and bureaucrats to regulate. Yet they keep trying. This creates disorder. This has lead to a distrust of politicians. There has been an increase of contempt for politics. “Politics was a pejorative word; an endeavor or institution that was branded as politicized lost its virtue” (p. 779). This is exactly what Nisbet had concluded 20 years earlier. The erosion of faith in politics is endemic in modern society. The old belief of politics as a force for social salvation is fading.
Another area of agreement between Nisbet and Barzun was that modern society produces boredom (p. 788). This is extremely dangerous for the survival of any society. It leads to a near addiction to entertainment. It fosters professional sports. It loses itself in the meaninglessness of leisure time that is put to no productive use.
In the final section, Barzun wrote a hypothetical summary that might be written by some future observer. His comments on social organization are at the heart of his analysis. Here is how he assessed the characteristic features of the coming era.
As for social organization, the people were automatically divided into interest groups by their residence and occupation, or again by some personal privilege granted for a social purpose. The nation no longer existed, superseded by regions, much smaller, but sensibly determined by economic instead of linguistic and historical unity. Their business affairs were in the hands of corporation executives whose view of their role resembled that of their medieval ancestors. Not the accumulation of territories but of companies and control over markets were their one aim in life, sanctified by efficiency (p. 800).The moral anarchy complained of in the early days of the Interim rather suddenly gave way to a strict policing of everybody by everybody else. In time it became less exacting, and although fraud, corruption, sexual promiscuity, and tyranny at home or in the office did not disappear, these vices, having to be concealed, attracted only the bold or restless. And even they agreed that the veil is a sign not of hypocrisy but of respect for human dignity.
As for peace and war, the former was the distinguishing mark of the West and the rest of the world. The numerous regions of the Occident in America formed a loose confederation obeying rules from Brussels and Washington in concert; they were prosperous, law-abiding, overwhelming in offensive weaponry, and they had decided to let outside peoples and their factions eliminate one another until exhaustion introduced peaceableness into their plans (p. 801).
Nisbet’s book presented the case that the modern world is losing faith in the future. This cannot last, he said, because societies need to have faith in the future and faith in progress. He thought that there might be some kind of religious revival or renewal to reverse the pessimism of the present age. Barzun saw the same sorts of social processes that Nisbet did, especially the spread of boredom. He recognized that the West has moved from a period of dawn into a period of decadence. He understood that faith in the existing institutional structures was fading by the end of the twentieth century. He recognized that the rise of violence undermined the legitimacy of the modern nation-state. The nation-state has rested on a series of promises. Nisbet and Barzun agreed: the state is failing to deliver the goods. This is undermining the state's legitimacy, and it will eventually lead to political and social decentralization. That is another word for fragmentation. This will lead to greater liberty for some people and less liberty for others. It will almost certainly lead to greater economic productivity, as long as peace is maintained. Technology will continue to develop. Education will move out of the control of the state. There will be new ways of learning, new ways of organizing, new ways of delivering the goods.
Four decades after Nisbet’s book was published, and two decades after Barzun’s book was published, the world seemed to be headed in the direction that they predicted. Confirming this was the book by Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public (2014), which described the disintegrating effects of social media on national political orders around the world. The nation-state does look as though it will break up into smaller units.
Barzun believed that the humanistic culture that became increasingly dominant around 1500 is coming to an end. The historiography of the early twentieth century began to break with the optimistic historiography of the Renaissance. It also broke with the confidence that humanistic historians had in their ability to find out what had happened in the past, the confidence that began with Renaissance historiography. The historians’ growing pessimism after 1920 regarding the ability of historians to understand the past matched the pessimism of the physicists regarding the future of mankind in a world governed by entropy.